June 2016

June 30, 2016

View of the Grand Canal and the Dogana,Bernardo Bellotto, about 1743

The other day I wrote about the 18th century Italian master Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto and his brilliant sense of light, perspective and structural detail. Barely five days later I have found Bernardo Bellotto, his nephew (1722-1780), who rivaled his uncle’s brilliant sense of light, perspective and structural detail. Interestingly, Bellotto also frequently used Canaletto as his professional sobriquet.

I cannot stop marveling at the passionate commitment to light, perspective and structural detail that the uncle-nephew team possessed. The two captured some remarkable views of Venice. As it often happens with accomplished painters they produced works which were cinematic. I have cited just two examples here. You can see how different the light is in both. What strikes me is that they both like so high-definition. It takes an extraordinary ability to achieve that.

View of the Tiber with the Castel Sant'Angelo, Bellotto, 1743/44

In the painting above, observe the close-up of the building and the two balconies. The way Bellotto has positioned the man and the woman, he makes you want to know their stories.

In terms of structural detail and perspective, see the close-up below.

I find this attention to detail and being able to reproduce it with paint scary good. The artist is able to capture the textural differences between stone, wood and fabric so breathtakingly well. (See below).

Once again, it leaves me dejected that I will never be able to produce works of even a billionth of a fraction of these.

June 28, 2016

Let us accept for a moment and for the sake of argument the Chinese description that the Dalai Lama is a “wolf in monk’s robes.” That prompts an immediate question. If that is indeed true, shouldn’t that wolf have revealed itself at least once in the past close to 77 years that Tenzin Gyatso has been the 14th Dalai Lama? And, conversely, if that wolf has not come out of the robes and done what wolves do, shouldn’t China find a new derisive description after so many decades?

Incidentally, I have met him many times since 1997 and for fairly extended periods but in those nearly two decades not once have I found any wolflike attributes. The only wolflike behavior he displays is when it comes to sizing up his interlocutor’s level of intelligence. But he does that with the subtlety of a Buddhist master and then continues.

I was thinking about this in the morning today on reading the news that China has banned Lady Gaga because she met the Dalai Lama in Indianapolis on Sunday. In particular, I was struck by the photo of the two together (See above) where Lady Gaga does actually look like a sheep in a sheep’s clothing. (It’s a joke, people).

In some sense being banned by China in such matters must be treated as a badge of honor. Your truly has long been wearing that badge—since 2007 to be precise—after the publication of the biography “The Dalai lama: Man, Monk, Mystic”. My personal website was banned in China as was my travel in the immediate aftermath of the publication. I am not quite sure if that still holds although it would be ludicrous to ban a journalist of zero consequence and even less visibility like me.

Just about now you can sense that I am injecting myself into this rather routine occurrence because I have nothing much to say this morning. I have now reached a stage where I live in the reflected glory of my own reflected glory.

Coming back to Lady Gaga’s China ban, I do not know what it really means other than access to things Lady Gaga in mainland China being fully blocked for the time being. It is a loss for sure but the upside—which is a rather impressive upside—is that she got banned trying to do the right thing in the presence of the Dalai Lama. "Kindness is a free currency from a well that will never dry up,” she says. Lady Gaga has been talking about the need for all-round kindness in the world, something that the Dalai Lama has practiced all his life, which is a rather uncharacteristic thing to do for a wolf, even the one in a monk’s clothing.

June 27, 2016

On his 77th birth anniversary today, it seems appropriate to republish a post I wrote about Rahul Dev Burman on June 27, 2014. Here goes:

The great sarod maestro and musician Ali Akbar Khan told me once this about Rahul Dev Burman, “Pancham (R D Burman) could pretty much do anything with music. He just lived music.” That was sometime in 1999, at Khan’s music academy in San Rafael, California where I had gone to interview him.

Khan was visibly happy to hear Burman’s name and, in fact, quickly hummed the great composer’s first song “Ghar aya ghir aayi” from the 1961 film ‘Chhote Nawab’ sung brilliantly by Lata Mangeshkar. Khan had a special fondness for Burman because as a child in the 1940s the latter learned the sarod under him. “He did not want to make a career as a Sarod player but strengthen his foundation as a music composer,” Khan told me.

Being a son the illustrious Sachin Dev Burman and himself a preternaturally talented musician, Pancham had his career laid out for him. People are surprised when they realize that he would have been 75 today had he lived past 1994 when he died at 55. At some level Burman seems like a figure from another era but at another level he is easily the most current of all Hindi cinema music composers.

I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with Burman at his apartment in the suburb of Khar in Mumbai in 1994, barely a few months before he died. I had gone to interview him. I vividly remember entering his music room whose floor was covered with wall-to-wall mattresses in spotless white sheets with half a dozen bolsters, also in white covers thrown about casually. Burman was sitting cross-legged and playing his harmonium. He was singing/humming something he had just composed. By the time I met him, he was well past his prime and made it a point to tell me that. “I have at least 1000 compositions sitting with me as of now,” he told me, “But no one wants them.”

Burman was then in the midst of composing for his last film ‘1942: A Love Story’ directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. The songs from the movie became widely popular. He asked me to accompany him for a recording of one of the songs at a studio in Mahalaxmi. I remember Burman, lyricist Javed Akhtar and I took a cab from Khar to Mahalaxmi. Once at the studio, he told me that he had unabashedly copied “Baba”—his great composer father Sachin Dev Burman—in some of that film’s music. In particular, he pointed out that interlude from the song ‘Jane who kaise log’ from the 1957 classic ‘Pyasa.’ “If you pay attention, you would feel as if your are listening to Baba’s composition,” Burman said.

That particular day Burman was recording a singer called Shivaji Chattopadhyaya for the song ‘Yeh safar bahut hai kathin magar na udas ho mere humsafar’. Being a Bengali speaker he had trouble with some of the pronunciations which Akhtar, a stickler for such details, kept correcting. It took some effort for Chattopadhyaya to nail it. I could see the Burman was getting restless and at one point said as long the singer sang it right they might have to compromise on his pronunciation.

In my book, Burman has always been one of the five greatest composers of Hindi cinema in this order—S.D. Burman, R.D. Burman, S.D. Burman, R.D. Burman and the fifth position changes among the others. That may seem like a controversial thing to say but we have to judge a Hindi cinema music composer, just as we have to do a cinema lyricist, by employing many varied yardsticks. The father and son have been unsurpassable from that standpoint.

June 26, 2016

In exulting over his side’s stunning Brexit victory Ukip leader Nigel Farage described June 24, 2016 as Britain’s “independence day.” Forget elementary questions such as Independence from whom? or Why was Britain not independent until the Brexit vote? I say forget because there is no answer to it.

I looked at Farage’s assertion of a new independence day from the Indian standpoint. If Britain is becoming independent only now, what happens to all those colonies that became independent from Britain some 70 years ago? Do they have to declare their independent afresh? Also, can they claim to be independent of their colonizer the same day that their colonizer feels it has achieved independence or do they have to wait for a day? Finally, what happens to all those lofty speeches that Indian leaders have since given? Do they become redundant? These are important questions that Farage must answer.

Also, if Britain was not independent until now, what precisely was its status? Was it legally a colony of the European Union? (Ignore the fact that colonization is an intrinsically illegal enterprise. A colonizer needs no legal fig leaf to cover its naked aggression.) For me the ridiculousness of the Brexit campaign became fully exposed when Farage proclaimed last Friday as Britain’s “independence day.” The notion that the United Kingdom would do anything that the EU imposed on it by virtue of the former’s membership of the latter seems ludicrous.

Here in America, it fell on the British political satirist John Oliver to first point out the sheer falsity of the claim that the EU membership costs Britain 350 million pounds a week. Oliver and others have said the figure is nowhere close to it. Even if one sets that aside for a moment, the Leave campaigner’s promise that the money thus saved by exiting the EU would then be spent on the National Health Service (NHS) was quickly repudiated by Farage as a “mistake.” There are expectations that many such grand promises made by the Leave campaign would be quickly exposed for what they are—at best, grandstanding and at worst, a fraud. The specific claim of 350 pounds was not made by the Farage section of the leave EU campaign.

Less than three days after the vote there are already signs of mounting buyer’s remorse across many cities and towns in Britain. Reports say a signature campaign demanding a do-over has already garnered close to two million signatures. One is not sure if that will change anything since the EU bosses are now in an unseemly hurry to get rid of Britain from the union. It is almost as if the EU was waiting for something like this to happen for so long that it no longer wants to wait. It has even dismissed British Prime Minister David Cameron’s move that he will write to the EU explaining what transpired. Instead, the EU says, it would be good enough if he just said it and be done with.

Many have described Cameron’s decision to seek an in/out referendum as one of the greatest political blunders in Britain’s history. It may well be that but one cannot disregard that even without the referendum those who felt so strongly against remaining in the union would have continued to harbor such deep antipathies. The only difference now is that they are no longer just antipathies but a binding decision which, it seems, cannot be undone even with a second referendum.

June 25, 2016

Great paintings are as much about colors, brushstrokes and perspective as they are about the ability to capture light. There are many painters who can capture light well but exceedingly few who can distil it down and mix it indistinguishably with colors the way the 18th century Italian master Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto did.

For a pretender like me it should take far less than the genius of Canaletto to quickly destroy my delusions about being anything approaching an artist. Even sidewalk sketchers in Manhattan are much better artists than I can ever be. So when one looks at Canaletto’s works one feels practically incapacitated. Having seen a large number European masters in very high resolution courtesy of Google’s Art Project, I can say that Canaletto’s sense of light is among the best.

Let me cite just a couple of his dozens of breathtakingly detailed works. The one above is almost three centuries old (295 to be precise). He was a master of the veduta style of painting. I just found out that veduta is Italian for view but in the world of art it describes highly detailed large-scale paintings. When you zoom in on Canaletto’s works you begin to understand veduta.

The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, Canaletto, 1730

I have chosen these two random works because they capture two very different kinds of light. The Canal Grande one on top appears to be a scene sometime just before dusk while the Entrance to the Grand Canal is clearly sometime in the early afternoon. You can see how distinctly different the light is in the two works. This is exceptionally hard to create, especially when there are so many physical elements such as buildings, boats, people, fabric, sky and water that Canaletto has captured. I am not even going into the extraordinary details he manages to paint in every little corner and with an accurate perspective. To be able to paint such varying textures and surfaces in a single painting is essential genius that I am talking about.

Take for instance the way he captures three different hues of light in the detail above. You can see that the sunlight is falling from the right of the painting. Notice how it changes according to the position of the buildings and boats.

In the same painting, see how on the opposite side facing the sun is so brilliantly different. I spotted some laundry hanging on the balcony of one of the buildings. As one zoomed in on it one understood the true measure of a genius. With a few brushstrokes that look like just scratches up-close Canaletto gives you clothes hanging to dry from a distance. Even in that detail one cannot miss the play of light.

I zoomed in on one of the boatmen and up-close it had the same brilliant craftsmanship at work.

Similarly, in the second work look at how superbly lighted the people and the buildings are below. The close-up of the boats and people below as well as the water are easily one of the greatest examples of how to paint light.

I have said versions of this many times before about what I do. My works do not even qualify to be insults to the kind of astonishing artistry you see in such works. Even insults have to have some measure of talent.

June 24, 2016

For a power that arbitrarily drew lines across lands and created fractious partitions as part of its colonial legacy is now facing its own existential splits and splinters. I am, of course, talking about the Disunited Kingdom.

I had no personal stake in the leave or remain referendum that has just resulted in Brexit but to the extent that one is interested in current affairs as a journalist there are several rapid thoughts that come to mind. One of them is what I started this post with. Another is about the prospects of Scotland now reviving the demand to exit from the U.K. They can call the new campaign Sexit. It is ironic that a significant reason why the Scots chose to stay on within the United Kingdom in the 2014 referendum was because Britain was part of the European Union. With the E.U. out of the equation, there are already rumblings about a new referendum in Scotland. There are reports of restiveness even inside Northern Ireland.

Not that there is any comparison but June 23, 2016 might be remembered as a kind of partition that the retiring colonial power left behind in the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Suddenly the most powerful colonizer of the last 300 years appears so utterly diminished from outside. The sun might set several times on Britain if you look at the way the leave-remain vote has been divided between cities and towns.

What has surprised many is the assertiveness of the leave vote with 52% favoring it. It was expected to be close but it turned out to be quite emphatic even though only four percent separates it. Britain’s geographical preeminence in the context of the E.U. for the world outside will be considerably reduced. London will remain a great city but there will be a distinct shadow around it. Some major consequences I can think of off the bat are the hassles of visas, tariffs, new individual trade deals and overall difficulties of freedom of movement within Europe. For the world outside Britain will cease to be a gateway to a great single market.

It has been pointed out that at the heart of the leave vote is a brand of worrisome nationalism which now views anything and everything unfamiliar with rancid contempt and suspicion. In a sense the leave vote is a serious rebuff to the establishment in London from those who feel left out. One sees many of the same trends in the United States as the presidential campaign becomes even sharper. It is not surprising that the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has been quoted as saying,“The UK has taken back control. It is a great thing.” His whole shtick is about taking back control and return to a time where cultural homogeneity prevailed.

In a significant sense the leave vote is also a direct consequence of the collapse in the Middle East, particularly places such as Syria from where waves of refugees are sweeping over Europe causing nationalists in Britain to draw the line.

In saying all this, I am not even remotely endorsing what has happened but merely quickly laying out what has happened. It is a pretty seismic shift in the cultural and political geology of not just Europe but in some ways the whole world.

A note about the painting above: Although I did it last night unrelated to the events in the U.K., on reflection it seems apt to have a man holding umbrella waiting for the ominous dark black and bottle green clouds.

June 23, 2016

As the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) basks in the warm glow of its impressively accomplished launch of 20 satellites, seventeen of them commercial, I have been thinking about Vikram Sarabhai and a lovely biography of his by dear friend and fellow journalist Amrita Shah.

In the aftermath of the launch, I was thinking about Amrita’s 2007 book ‘Vikram Sarabhai, A Life’ and the need for its publisher Penguin Viking to reissue it considering the facility where ISRO plans and controls such launches is called Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. There are very few such establishments in India where a person after whom they are named is so eminently deserving as Sarabhai. He was, by any consensus, the father of India’s space program.

Amrita has done a terrific job of capturing Sarabhai’s rather extraordinary life in the context of his unparalleled success as a great institution builder in India. The space program was just one of them. I strongly recommend you buy the paperback which will be out soon. If I had my way, I would make this prescribed reading for high schools.

Having been born and raised in Ahmedabad, and being what I would retrospectively be called a nerd, for me Dr. Sarabhai and space were interchangeable. This is notwithstanding a great diversity of other institutions that he created, including playing a defining role in India’s nuclear program. ISRO’s website lists at least ten major institutions that he founded. They are:

In the chapter ‘Launching into Space’ Amrita traces the origins of Dr. Sarabhai’s space program vision as far back as the 1950s when he was in his 30s. “It is, of course, obvious, given his area of interest and his international exposure, that the possibility of using rockets for space experiments must have been an intensely desirable one for Vikram. Yet the truth was that at the time, let alone a program of artificial satellites and rocket launchers—which Vikram was to unfold over time—even a modest rocket program seemed a fairly audacious idea.”

One has to remember that we are talking the 1950s, barely within a decade of India emerging from nearly two centuries of a predatory colonial rule. For a young man in his 30s to envision a space program and make it happen was nothing short of spectacular. If I had the resources, I would make a grand film on the theme. It is essential that the younger generations in India today, so swift in taking off with their poorly constructed but vitriolic angst on social media, know about someone like Dr. Sarabhai as they celebrate ISRO’s remarkable success.

India’s space program and its incredible economic efficiency are now globally acknowledged. The launch of 20 satellites simultaneously in 26 minutes has firmly established itself as among the preeminent commercial launch nations, the United States (NASA) and Russia (the Russian Federal Space Agency). NASA launched 29 satellites in 2013 and Russia 33 in 2014. At 20 in 2016, India is now number three.

Apart from satellites belonging to companies such as Google, the rocket also carried India’s own 725.5-kilogram Cartosat-2 which will be used for earth observation. It is an astonishing convergence of technologies and vision, the latter having begun close to six decades ago in the mind of one man, Dr. Sarabhai.

June 22, 2016

Yesterday I was woken up at 3 a.m. by three fully formed verses. Today it was a vision of this painting titled The Red Bridge. When poetry and painting wake you up, it is a sure sign of penury. Now that I am upon the bridge I have to cross it.

June 21, 2016

I frequently think about how at utter variance the poetic and the scientific can be. Dwelling in both worlds I understand the need for either to human existence but nothing stops me from pointing out the chasm between what we poetically imagine things around us to be and how different they are in scientific terms. The latest example is Venus, the second rock from the sun.

For a very long time Venus has been emblematic of beauty, particularly feminine beauty, fertility, prosperity and everything that is life-giving. That is a poetic construct that builds on the planet’s gorgeously bright appearance in the sky and nothing much else. As any science teacher would tell you Venus as a planet is as far removed from beauteous graces as it can be.

Consider some basic facts about the planet that is about 67 million miles or about 3/4 as far as the Earth is from the sun. That proximity to the sun makes Venus like various versions of hell. It has a haze of sulfuric acid in the atmosphere and has surface temperatures around 860 F (460 C), which is high enough to melt lead. In comparison, my home town of Ahmedabad recently reported surface temperature ranging between 46 and 50 degrees C. Its atmospheric pressure is about 100 times more than the Earth’s. It is an utterly dry planet where no amount of moisturizer, presuming you survived sulfuric acid haze and 860 F, would help.

Venus is the most Earth-like planet in terms if its size and gravity with a diameter of 7500 miles and 91 % of the Earth’s respectively. Because it is closer to the sun, its year is about 225 Earth days. Then in a weird twist, its day is about 243 Earth days because the planet rotates once every 243 days. Those on the Earth who complain their day is not nearly long enough to accomplish all the fantastic things they want to should consider relocating to Venus. If you can reconcile, remember the Venusian day is longer than its year.

Now comes a paper by Glyn Collinson, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the journal Geophysical Research Letters that speaks of a powerful electric wind on the planet. So if the sulfuric acid haze, 860 F, 100 times denser atmosphere and 243-Earth-day-long Venusian day are not enough for you, you have an electric wind on the planet. “We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space. This is something that has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars,” Collinson says in a NASA release.

“We found that the electric wind, which people thought was just one small cog in a big machine, is in fact this big monster that’s capable of sucking the water from Venus by itself,” he says. This wind is powerful enough to strip Venus of its oxygen molecules, making it 10,000 to 100,000 times drier than the Earth. Those earthlings who complain of an oily skin leading to all sorts of problems might consider Venus as their home.

When you consider all these facts you begin to understand the massive chasm between the poetic and the scientific. If your conception of real beauty is that it is a beauty that burns and chokes you death or simply melt you down, then Venus is your thing.